Network Pinger Features

Simple, innovative and intuitive interface

Network Pinger's interface was designed and studied so that it would the most intuitive possible, and easy to learn without help from tutorials. It has also all its functionalities in easy to find places inside all windows, and the main window has all the tools easily accessible from it.

Optimized for best performance

This freeware was optimized and tested until the best performance possible was obtained. It's because of this that in the image at right we can see 1,000 pings to the localhost done in 35 ms (an average of 28,571 per second), and with charts and statistics in real time, maybe in 70/80 ms, it was a small test to measure this software's speed.

This way we can be sure that if some pings made to a certain host are slow, then it would certainly not be the software's fault. The same way, all the other functionalities will be very fast, like a traceroute that would be able to make the 3 tests to 11 hops in just 5 seconds, among other examples. This way there are faster tools available, much faster than most of the traditional command line ones, without mentioning its graphical interface. It was optimized to the fullest, and with multi-threading. It could be even more optimized in the future (only a question of time, depending on the feedback on this one).

Powerful tools

Network Pinger includes several powerful and useful tools for those who work in network or systems administration everyday or for those who simply need to use it occasionally. Not only there is a very powerful mass ping tool with browsing automation to extract hosts dynamically from web pages or files, as also several other separated tools, not only related to networks but also to systems. Here you have a small list of some of those tools:

Mass pings with automation;

Pings to single hosts;

Traceroutes;

Port scanner;

WMI Queries;

Whois to domains and IPs;

Name resolution;

IP calculator;

Text Editor with tools;

IP converter;

Data extraction;

Among others...

Procedure automation

Network Pinger comes with an automated browsing functionality, which allows its user to configure it to connect automatically to a web page, download the possible options to select from inside, and allows its user to make the software select the option that the user has chosen, in the page itself, download the data after submitting the form, extract the hosts from text or HTML tables, and populate the table with those hosts and data for the user to start the mass pings later, with a simple mouse click.

This interesting functionality makes this software become an interface between the user and a web service inside a company, completely automating this task, making a single mouse click enough to browse to a page, submit forms, download data, extract hosts and data from there, populate the table, and ping those hosts, something very useful specially in those cases of Internet companies like ISPs, or even network administrators who need to test the connections to several groups of machines from time to time, or that need to ping entire networks to know the state of their hosts.

There are other types of automation offered by this software, like functions to filter IPs and domains with a single mouse click, for a quick extraction of hosts from texts in our Clipboard memory. It is then enough just to do a "copy" and "click" and it's done, we'll have a list of hosts in memory.

Robust and multi-threading

Network Pinger was tested on the machines it was created on, and was able to manage lists of more then 10,000 hosts being mass-pinged without crashing. It was tested this way due to the necessity of having to ping several thousands of hosts in mass ping operations sometimes. It was also tested with dozens of windows of its tools opened, being all of them running operations like a ping, a traceroute, or other tools simultaneously with no problems whatsoever.

It was also created to work in a multi-threading environment, configurable by the user, being the user allowed to limit the maximum number of threads that the software could use and the software will this way divide all the tasks and operations through all the threads to take the maximum advantage from the computer possible, without nevertheless heavily affect the system's performance and without occupying all the free resources. Two tools which use a lot of this feature would be the mass pings and the port scanner, for example.

Customization and integration

This software was designed in such a way to be the more customizable possible by its users. Not only the users are able to define a great variety of parameters inside each tool, but also configure a set of custom commands to allow the integration with other softwares the users may use daily and may want to launch from Network Pinger itself.

It comes by default with some preconfigured commands, and also remote connections configured in integration with the Putty software, which is included in the Network Pinger downloadable package and that can be exchanged by another one the user might prefer.

It gives us also the possibility of configuring logotypes, whether for the software interface itself, or for the printed reports, useful in those cases where it would be used in workplaces and need to have the company's logotype on those printed reports.

Saved sessions

This software also has the possibility to save sessions. This way, after the software is started, the user can start a new previously saved session that will present you the interface with all the options that you saved before, using the auto-browsing feature to automatically get the hosts from a page or file, or start with a session that would extract the hosts from a given IP address range or subnet, or even a session configured to extract the hosts from a text file or HTML table on the Internet or file, etc. These sessions are saved to be quickly accessed later, and the configuration file could be shared with other users, giving them this way the possibility to share predefined sessions with other elements of a team or company in an easy way.

Real time charts

Network Pinger brings us innovation when it concerns its graphical presentation and its visualization of results, without damaging its performance. As we've seen in the example above about its performance, the software can make for example 1,000 pings to the localhost with real time charts active in a very pleasing 0.07 seconds, which shows us that those charts are ready to be shown in real time without damaging the software's performance whenever they are necessary.

Almost all tools in this software, when useful, have some kind of graphical visualization of results with them. Like the pings or traceroutes that have two charts of times, a line chart and a pie chart, the port scanner has a line chart of times and another one to show the percentage of open ports, or even the mass ping tool window that has four distinct charts, two with the times of pings and another two referring to the percentages of time online of hosts.

Creation and printing of reports

The software was made ready to generate reports, that can be saved in several file formats, like HTML, text, or .RTF (Rich Text File), or even printed with custom logos, specially configured for printing documents. On the mass ping tool, we can even select the hosts to be included on the reports so that we don't have to generate report including all of them at the same time.

There is also a function that allows us to click on the text editor button, and see the document to print in an embedded text editor, so that we are able to change the report before it gets printed.

Updates

This software will be updated and/or improved with time, depending also on its author's free time. For that reason, from time to time, maybe also according to the feedback received from its users, the software can be improved so that it may better satisfy the needs of those who really use it.